astro-ph theme of the day: the 3rd stage of grief (bargaining) - try whatever statistical prestidigitation you can to find Earth-like planets in Kepler data, knowing all the while that there will never be enough data to validate your conclusions

user54412

also

user54412

Public Service Announcement: If you are a pseudo-scientist submitting to hep-th or hep-ph or gr-qc, please refrain from cross-posting to astro-ph when you don't even understand the basics of the astrophysical systems you think back your pet theory

Public Service Announcement: If you are a scientist making a ranty Public Service Announcement, _please_ do not do so in the h bar when Manish is around. Only Manish is allowed to rant here. :P </rant>

ArXiv doesn't have comments, right?

(You probably could make cross posting deadly by assembling a group of astro-ph patrollers)

@ChrisWhite Ugh... So you people are basically saying that a cup with cool water - you can't predict whether ice was dissolved in dry water, or the cup was taken from the fridge and placed out..! ??? o.O

(Irreversibility and invariance) -_-

user54412

@ManishEarth You know I've never actually used the mexican hat potential - i'm not even sure what it does

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a mode of realization of symmetry breaking in a physical system, where the underlying laws are invariant under a symmetry transformation, but the system as a whole changes under such transformations, in contrast to explicit symmetry breaking. It is a spontaneous process by which a system in a symmetrical state ends up in an asymmetrical state. It thus describes systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey certain symmetries, but the lowest energy solutions do not exhibit that symmetry.
Ponder the bottom of an empty wine bottle, a symmetri...

Explaining the Higgs mechanism properly is a fair bit beyond the level of the Feynman lectures, but here's an attempt.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking
In order to understand the Higgs mechanism in detail, you need to know about two concepts that are involved in quantum field theory. The first is ...

user54412

there are mexican hat functions in signal processing - but I don't think those are the same...

So, I was solving this problem1 and I realized that the system given seems to be non-deterministic when analysed with classical laws.
The situation is thus: A rope is wrapped for an angle of $\theta_0$ around a fixed pole (the circle in the diagram). One end is fixed to a wall, and the other e...

Using your definition of "falling," heavier objects do fall faster, and here's one way to justify it: consider the situation in the frame of reference of the center of mass of the two-body system (CM of the Earth and whatever you're dropping on it, for example). Each object exerts a force on the ...

So, perhaps instead of a clock I could balance another ball on my head, which will dislodge and follow a nice parabola and then from that calculate the time in each frame. Can somebody do better (easier) than that?

Suppose I swept a clay infield, throw the ball and measure the distance between two bounces, would that provide enough information? Probably not, but how about three bounces then?

user54412

I would bet three bounces could get a decent answer with calibration - I wouldn't want to try to predict a priori how much energy will be transferred amongst spin, linear motion, and the ground upon impact

Back, to the iPhone then. Suppose I take a picture, could I count on the ball being blurred along some length and then use the "picture time" (what is that called?) to work it out? Or won't the ball be visible at all?

user54412

7:02 PM

@Gugg In principle that should work, but there is probably some anti-blur technology at work inside the phone

user54412

a feature bug of sub-prosumer cameras is that they all do an enormous amount of post-processing on the images that cannot be turned off

user54412

for example, if you look at digital pictures from the 90s, when CCD's were relatively new technology, you'll see lots of graininess, and part of that is cosmic rays hitting the chip

user54412

that can't be stopped, but now images are filtered to remove spurious "noise" - which is why many cameras have a hard time taking pictures of stars

user54412

I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of unsharp masking being done before the data is even saved

Question: since basically every paper that is published (unless it's just reaffirming something old) is on the 'cutting edge' of science, a little, how do editors judge whether it's real or just garbage? Not like, fake data, but just a bad concept or execution?

user54412

8:36 PM

@YungHummmma that would also be good to ask on the chat associated with Academia

user54412

I short answer I suppose is editors rely on reviews from people also at the cutting edge, people who should have some idea what results to expect

user54412

and certainly there are bad concepts that get published, and probably there are good ideas that get rejected - it's pretty imperfect

@YungHummmma Most people work on a reasonably compact set of problems and they know and are known to many of the others working on the same problems, so the preconditions for a reputation are in place and, in fact, reputation plays a big part in it. Newcomers to the subfield will be subject to special scrutiny, and had better make it clear that they understand what has gone before.